Robert Peston’s father defends his son

The Serious Fraud Office is still deliberating over whether to investigate the BBC's exciteable business editor Robert Peston about the sources of his many market-moving City scoops, a move that was instigated by Tory MP Greg Hands and backed by the shadow chancellor George Osborne. And in the House of Lords on Tuesday, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, the former Tory Cabinet minister, demanded that at the very least a Commons select committee should be established to grill Peston.

However, his father, Lord Peston, a Labour peer and emeritus professor of economics at Queen Mary College, was having none of it. Responding to Forsyth, he said: "I want merely to point out, in reference to a first-class journalist who gets his stories perfectly legitimately, that we do not need an inquiry. We just need to have excellent journalists doing their job properly." ·